via washingtontimes:
Rep. Ritchie Torres won reelection last month with roughly 73,000 votes, out of fewer than 90,000 cast in his district in the heart of the Bronx.
Slip across the East River and it took Nick LaLota 173,000 votes, out of more than 300,000 ballots cast, to win his Long Island race.
They’re in the same state, but those who cast ballots in Mr. Torres’ district effectively had three times as much political power in picking their member of Congress.
Some of that is population age, since only those over 18 are eligible to vote, but the biggest factor is immigration: Nearly 20% of his district are noncitizens — either illegal immigrants or legal ones who have not gotten citizenship.
They are still counted in divvying up districts, though, meaning that the citizens in Mr. Torres’ district benefit from living near so many noncitizens.
The result is a strange warp in political power in the House of Representatives, where some voters’ voices carry extra political weight because of where they live near.
“Some members of Congress represent more voters than others,” said Howard Husock, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has studied the issue. “Because of this massive immigration and this geographic concentration, we’ve created an incredible distortion in congressional representation. That should be concerning.”
A difference in voting power is built into the Senate, where it’s a feature that Delaware’s roughly 700,000 potentially eligible voters get as much say as California’s 26 million.
But the House was supposed to be different, with the 435 districts giving voters a more intimate chance at selecting their representatives. Indeed, the Supreme Court has found in the Constitution a demand that “as nearly as is practicable, one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.”
via nypost:
EL PASO, Texas — In the middle of the West Texas desert, a giant tent — bigger than a football field — is being thrown up by the US Border Patrol as El Paso prepares for a human tidal wave to cross the border with Mexico as soon as the Title 42 health policy comes to an end.
The makeshift facility northeast of downtown will serve as an overflow processing center when Title 42 expires — which could happen as soon as this week, depending on whether the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Biden administration from 19 Republican-led states who want to keep the policy in place.
The Border Patrol already has a Central Processing Center in El Paso, but it will not be able to meet the demand post-Title 42 – when as many as 5,000 migrants per day are anticipated to enter the city.
“It’s still going to get worse before it even gets better, and that’s what we’re preparing for,” El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said Friday. “That’s what I call the unknown.”
“As we know [Border Patrol’s] CPC, central processing center, has a capacity of 1,400; we know that their breaking point is 5,000,” El Paso Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino said at a public meeting the same day. “With this surge, they know that they will not be able to hold it.”